keepthepace

keepthepace, 5 hours ago

Anti-capitalism doesn’t necessarily means communism. Note that both decentralization and anti-statism also score pretty high.

I hate tankies too but they do not represent the entirety of the anticapitalist movement.

keepthepace, 2 days ago

The subject deserves a better treatment than this relatively shallow pop-scifi video. This has been a question in science-fiction for more than a century. No, it did not start with Star Trek, Asimov dates it as far back as 1818 Frankenstein. If you are bold you can see this theme in the 2000 years old story of Talos, the bronze colossus that wanted immortality (ancient Greece was surprisingly full of automatons, Rhodes was known for them).

The question is what does imbue humans with what makes us see them as humans? Please don’t use the word “soul”. It is meaningless and religious, does not refer to any observable thing.

And don’t use “intelligence” as an interchangeable word with that undefined property, that most sci-fi authors have took to call “sentience”. That word is not human-centric and they typically apply sentience or the question of sentience to aliens or machines.

We have a hard time seeing as sentient something that has zero sense of ego. You can make an extremely intelligent machine with no ego, no sense of self. This is what you have in LLMs.

Giving them a sense of self and ego is probably feasible, but it is both useless and a huge responsibility. Maybe will happen first as an art project, but then you have to question the morality of creating something that does not want to die (or at least expresses it) but is not recognized as a person.

It also interrogates our notion of the linearity of the self. If such a sentient being can be forked, suspended, copied, have memories wiped out, fake memories implanted, personality changed, willingly or unwillingly, that opens a lot of philosophical questions.

I wish the community would embrace them, but so far all we have had are extremely superficial debates over “true” intelligence, usually defined as the difference between what humans can do and machines can do, an ever-shrinking territory.

keepthepace, 2 days ago

For me it stopped when it started getting interesting.

And “ghosts” are such a cop out to not talk about the hard questions.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love GitS which is a stunning piece of art, but it barely scratched the surface.

keepthepace, 2 days ago

Been there, done that :-)

30 minutes of video is a lot of time to go a bit deeper, especially if you assume the audience knows half of the movies mentioned.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

I like it! I think you prefer this style instead of a solar panel + laser installation so I won’t bother you with efficiency calculation. On the use of the beam however, the unreliable power of the source is going to make the direct use difficult. I think that most CNC tools (cutter, printer, etc) will prefer to use this source to heat a heatmass and add an electronically controllable way to transfer the heat and PID-control it.

So it’s possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat

Yes! One square meter of sun gives 1000W at noon in perfect conditions. A 1000W laser cuts through several centimeters of metal. Of course, the challenge is in the focus (and boy will you have trouble there!) but if you achieve a good concentration over a large lens, you can reach pretty high power.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

You can absolutely do these other things yes.

I would not bother with a small lens from a projector, you can buy an A4 fresnel lens for less than 10 USD in amazon and much cheaper in bigger quantities. That’s already going to be a challenge to do something interesting with that size.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

Oh ok then!

keepthepace, 7 days ago

Ok, let me address the punk thing.

Punks are people who resist oppressions and who defy rules, mostly censorship and mostly in arts. Singing profanities in a democracy and doing things that are legal is fashion-punk. As soon as improving your community, and progressing towards more acceptance and inclusiveness is legal, you don’t need to be punk anymore.

Punks have no future because their own fight is to make them irrelevant. It is to turn a fascist society into one that does not need them, one where it is effective to engage in social works and to collaborate with public institutions.

Solarpunk is a joke on “cyberpunk”, that’s all. It is an utopian movement in which punks are irrelevant.

If you want to write punk stories in a solarpunk setting, then you need to construct a dystopian antagonist.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

Where do you live?

keepthepace, 6 days ago

Well, yes, obviously we are not in a utopia (yet) and you have plenty of obstacles in the way. But if you depict a solarpunk utopia, it typically has no “punks” in it unless you invent a dystopian aspect as well.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

Exactly. And the punk attitude of instinctive opposition to almost any organized effort becomes detrimental to that at one point.

keepthepace, 7 days ago

I’d have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.

I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked “hardware guy” who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.

On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.

So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that’s a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.

keepthepace, 6 days ago

Les paranos que je connais (et le gouvernement Fr quand il a voulu faire une messagerie secure) choisissent Matrix, un protocole complètement ouvert, fédéré et self-host. Ça vient avec ses propres problèmes mais c’est l’autre solution acceptable.

Perso je trouve que Signal et Matrix sont les deux meilleures solutions. Après, toutes les solutions chiffrées E2E restent au dessus de Telegram AMHA, ce qui inclue la plupart des messageries modernes (oui, même Facebook messenger). Telegram est contrôlé par un Russe qui vit à Dubai. Qui a eu des démêlées avec le Kremlin mais « les a résolues en faisant plier le gouvernement russe ». Mouais.

keepthepace, 7 days ago

The Huggingface page has examples of how to use it: huggingface.co/…/granite-8b-code-instruct

keepthepace, 12 days ago

If you are aware of them, why don’t you join an existing cooperative like Motion Twin? I would recommend go to one first before trying to make your own

In gamedev like in many other endeavor, I would not start a coop or a regular company without some experience or without at least a clear project in mind.

Like you said, there is no big capital investment in gamedev but there is still one: time. In a coop you are asking people to invest their own time in the hope that a few months down the line, a video game will be able to make a profit in a very competitive market. You have to give people reason to do it and to do it with you instead of going solo. That’s how FOSS projects work.

You can lead the way: work a month on a project you would love and show people the result. It will be a WIP but as recruitment goes “help me finish that game” is easier to sell than “let’s get together discuss what you want but I promise there will be profit down the line, but I haven’t figured a business model yet”

keepthepace, 12 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Heh, when you can’t compete on the performance anymore, compete on the openness.

I don’t like calling it “NSFW”, the correct term is “uncensored”. The problem is not that it can’t generate titties, the problem is that it seriously limits its intelligence to limit it to “socially acceptable” answers. That was one of the points of Fahrenheit 451: censorship is a one way street. You can’t go back once you start squashing “fringe” opinions purely on the ground it may shock people.

keepthepace, 13 days ago

key part: includes hydropower. The world was at 20% already in 1985.

keepthepace, 13 days ago

Not really

keepthepace, 13 days ago

A bit. We have basically done x2.5 in electricity production since 1985 and x2 in hydropower.

keepthepace, 13 days ago

What do you guys think about this?

Not enough information to know if this is a good or a bad idea.

A tool that does bodycam -> written reports automatically may improve things. One that simply fakes a lot of details so that it looks like a well fleshed report is a terrible idea.

Generally speaking, the less human subjectivity intervenes in law enforcement, the better off we are. Yet companies and police always somehow find a way to turn good ideas into terrible implementation. I do hope it is for the best, but it could as well increase accountability as it could mass-manufacture lies.

keepthepace, 16 days ago

Et forcément dés que je lance ça avec mon compte de secours, slrpnk.net remarche! Bon, je continue avec mon compte jlai.lu mais si vous passez sur ce fil après la fin du AMA mieux vaut me pinger en répondant à ce message.

keepthepace, 20 days ago

Merci! Je supprime.

keepthepace, 20 days ago

Merci! Je supprime.

keepthepace, 20 days ago

La démographie était le thème de mon premier (et seul, hélas) billet de prospective optimiste, à l’époque sur reddit:

old.reddit.com/…/détendances_ep_1_la_démographie/